Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

I went out and took the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’ and glared at Fintan until he left the hall. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Is that you?’ said the guy at the other end. ‘Is that you?’

So, he introduced himself — which is odd if you have slept with someone already. Then, he asked me out for ‘a date’. I didn’t know what to say. There was none of that when I started out. You just bumped into people. You just stayed for one more drink and then by accident until closing time, and then by a miracle, by a fumble, by something slippery and inadvertent, for the night. (But it was a serious business, this accident, I’m telling you. It was as serious as an accident with a car.) This was partly what I had been thinking in the kitchen, as the pasta slithered through the egg and the cream — How do I do this now? How do I crash the goddamn car?

‘So, what about Friday night?’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Or Wednesday?’

I checked an imaginary diary in the darkness of the hall, and listened for a while to the dialling tone, after he had put down the phone.

I wasn’t sure that I liked him. That was all.

The dinner was hilarious. I should stop whining about my life, but I sat in a restaurant with red velvet curtains and white linen tablecloths and expensive, smirking waiters, and wondered, as I played with the fish knife, what all this was for . We went back to his place and I could feel the migraine coming through the sex. It should have been nice — I have no objection to sex — but with the migraine starting I felt as though he was a long way away from me, and every thrust set my brain flaring until I was very small and curled up, somehow, at the bottom of my own personal well.

Of course he was very solicitous and insisted on driving me home. Men say they want casual sex but, when you say thanks-very-much-goodnight they get quite insulted, I find. So he touched the side of my face and asked could he see me again, and when I said yes he undid the central locking system with a hiss and a clunk, and let me go.

In the kitchen I drank four cups of kick-ass black coffee, and went to bed. And waited.

Some time the next day, Fintan came in and closed the curtains where there was a little burn of light coming through. I was so happy the light was gone, I started to cry. There is something unbelievable about a migraine. You lie there and can’t believe it. You lie there, rigid with unbelief, like an atheist in hell.

Fintan settled himself on a chair beside the bed and started to read to me. I didn’t mind. I could hear everything and understand everything, but the words slid by. He was holding my childhood copy of Alice in Wonderland and I wondered were the colours that intense when I was young; Alice’s hair a shouting yellow, the flamingo scalded pink in her arms.

He got to the bit about the three sisters who lived in the treacle well — Elsie, Lacie and Tillie. And what did they live on? Treacle.

‘They couldn’t have done that, you know,’ Alice said, ‘they’d have been ill.’

‘So they were,’ said the Dormouse. ‘VERY ill.’

I smiled, swamped by self-pity. And suddenly I got it — clear as clear — the smell of treacle, like a joke. The room was full of it. Sweet and burnt. It was a dilation of the air: it was a pebble dropped into the pool of my mind, so that, by the time the last ripple had faded, the pain was gone or thinking of going. The pain was possible once again.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Fintan.

He looked at me in the half-dark. Downstairs, the phone began to ring. I went to get out of bed but Fintan stopped me, just by the way he sat there, in a chair by my side.

A couple of weeks later I was arguing with him, banging his dirty dishes in the kitchen. It is possible Fintan has a problem with water. It is possible all men have a problem with water. Some day they will find the gene for it, but in the meantime, I want a better life.

But of course Fintan never answers back, so the argument is always about something else — something you can’t quite put your finger on. The argument is about everything.

Yes, I wanted to say, he is married. But he is separated — well and legally separated — from a wife who is always sick; a daughter who is bright but will not eat; another daughter who is his pride and joy. I liked him; he made the effort. Every time we met, there was some present; usually not to my taste, but ‘tasteful’ all the same; small and expensive, like some moment from a fifties film. And there was an astonishing darkness in bed. That had to be said. I felt, as he reared away from me, that he was thinking about nothing, that there were no words in his head. He rolled his eyes back into it, and the widening dark was bliss to him. It was like watching a man die. It was like having sex with an animal.

None of which I said as I banged the saucepan from Fintan’s scrambled eggs on to the draining board. I didn’t mention the too-bright daughters either, or the crumbling ex-wife. What I did say was that Fintan had to find somewhere for the Christmas holidays, because I didn’t want to be worried about him in the house by himself.

‘Christmas doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Right.’

Of course not. Christmas, I went down home. What mattered was the New Year, because when midnight struck I would be in a hotel, drinking good champagne beside bad swagged curtains. I would be in bed with my new squeeze, my big old, hairy old, Mister Daddy-O.

And. And. And.

‘And I don’t mind your dishes, Fintan, but I really can’t take scrambled egg.’

There was a silence.

‘Fried?’

‘Fried is fine.’

He was right. Fintan didn’t care about the champagne, or even about the curtains. I suspect he wasn’t even bothered by the sex. He cared about something else. A small flame that he put his hands around, but could not touch.

He is the gentlest man I know.

But it was a gentle feeling I had, too. I wanted to say that, somehow — that this man had too much money and no taste, but he wanted me very hard. I wanted to say how helpless this made him; how violent and grateful I felt him to be. I wanted to say that he had flat, self-important eyes but the back of his neck smelt like a baby’s hair.

That evening, as I opened the front gate, I heard the sound of the piano starting up in the house behind me. It was dusk. Across the road, the alcoholic teacher had put up his Christmas lights; a different shape in each of the windows. There was a square and a circle downstairs, upstairs a triangle and what we used to call a rhomboid, all in running, flashing, gold and white. Over by the postbox, an object flew out from among a cluster of boys and landed in the roadway. It was a skateboard. I stood there with my hand on the cold, low handle of the gate and listened to the first bars of Pathétique .

You only play when I’m not looking, I thought. Every time I look, you stop.

I stood at the bus stop, but as soon as the bus appeared I pulled my coat around me and walked back to the house. Because, if he was playing again, then the shake was gone from his hands. And if the shake was gone then he was off his pills and all hell was about to be let loose — airport police, Fintan running naked through Dublin or, if he was lucky, Paris; Fintan balanced on the parapets of buildings or bridges, with his pockets full of rocks.

I had never seen him in full flower. I was away when it started, the summer after our finals — in which, of course, he had done indecently well. His notes, they discovered later, were written all in different colours, and some were in code. There was a dried-out pool of blue ink draining out of the bath, staining the enamel. It was still there when I got back to the house — hugely sad. The blue of his thoughts, the blood of his mind, I thought, as I tried to scrub it away and failed, or sat in the bathwater and looked at it.